Hello! Went radio silent there. Probably going to come here for more try-hard kinds of posts. My twitter's a bit better with actually posting art stuff.
At any rate, I thought I'd start doing more detailed breakdowns just to document some stuff. First up's Health and Wellness, a recent work:
It's a pair of potions! I kinda mapped "health" to the health potion and "wellness" to the mana potion.
We'll start off with the glass bottles. I started off with some cylinders and did some manual vertex editing to round off the ends and make an opening. The actual mesh doesn't have a top, since that would get in the way of how the glass shader works.
I mixed a transparent node with a basic toon shader to achieve a shiny glass effect using Blender's mix shader node. The main difficulty in doing this is just to make sure that a bunch of checkmarks are ticked off in some settings menus, or else the transparent parts won't actually play nice with the toon shader in EEVEE.
The stoppers are obviously cylinders. I learned a lot about UV editing (beyond just hopelessly clicking buttons in the UV menu) from a bunch of workflow videos, so I decided to just make one general cork texture and modified the UV's of both corks to add variety to each specific one.
The liquids are pretty basic toon shaders, but they nicely interact with the glass so it actually feels like light is getting through to them. Always nice when things turn out looking the way you want them to.
The little sparkles were modeled from a heavily-modified sphere. Did a bit of sculpting for those. They're just emission shaders with some bloom. The size-changing animations come from some looping keyframes. I applied a cycles modifier to a basic constant-to-constant interpolation between scales.
The big "Health and Wellness" banner is a mesh made from a nurbs surface. I learned more about how cool they are from watching a bunch of sped-up process videos. It definitely helps out in the general pipeline, since nurbs surfaces naturally make reasonable UV maps after turning them into meshes. Certainly helped in this case when I manually painted a paper texture with the words drawn on it. The toon shader then takes that coloring as an input and makes sure to apply shadow as necessary.
The world was set to a nice maroon-y color for a background, and I parented all of the props to a sinusoidal up-and-down motion. The camera then rotates around the origin to highlight some of the angles.
Pow! Health and wellness.